


analyzing my behavior

by basketofnovas (slashmarks)



Category: Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, BDSM, Bloodplay, Bondage, Breathplay, Dom/sub, Dream Sex, F/F, F/M, Multi, Switching, Wet Dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2019-01-28 07:34:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12601504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas
Summary: Malak reaches out a hand and strokes large fingers across the soft skin of her throat. The motion is strangely delicate. Nevertheless, his calluses catch.“Shh,” he croons, and she did not previously know that an artificial voice could make that tone.This is a dream.Revan dreams about Malak, and consequently, so does Bastila.





	analyzing my behavior

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: So, there is no point in this fic where someone commits rape, and the sex in the memories is consensual BDSM. But it is basically about Bastila involuntarily sharing Revan's involuntary sex dreams/memories which she would not want to share with Bastila, with a fair amount of protesting-too-much about who wants to be there. I decided that checking the Rape/Non-con box would be kind of misleading, but be advised.
> 
> General notes: This is set in a similar continuity to my other KOTOR fic besides _replaced the find mind behind your face,_ but the exact sequence of events and character relationships are not necessarily identical.
> 
> Title from "Dumb" by Garbage.

Malak reaches out a hand and strokes large fingers across the soft skin of her throat. The motion is strangely delicate. Nevertheless, his calluses catch.

“Shh,” he croons, and she did not previously know that an artificial voice could make that tone.

This is a dream.

Bastila knows it with the absolute and useless clarity of a child's knowledge that the monster under the bed is not real; the way that she knows no one is behind her when she walks home alone at night--

Except that she is Bastila Shan, who was given to the Jedi order at the age of four, who grew up on agrarian, sunlit Dantooine and was shuffled off after adolescence to command on ships; who has never walked home alone, let alone at night on a city planet where imagined danger lurked behind her shoulder.

This is a dream – but it _is_ real, and so the fact is impotent against her fear. Or rather, her lack of fear. She wants the roiling emotions that bubble up to be distilled down to fear and perhaps disgust, but in fact neither is contained in the mass.

This is a memory. It may not be _her_ memory, but Revan is gone, and Bastila does find some fear in the thought that she is absorbing Revan's ghost with every piece of sourceless knowledge and subtly altered reaction. Perhaps the memory has become hers, with no one else to claim it.

And, too, knowing it is a dream does not allow her to wake.

Her lips move without her permission or will: “I'm not afraid, Malak,” she says with a careless bravado she has never used in her waking life. Her lips curve in a wide, unfamiliar smile, and her heart hammers in her chest with an intensity she has never before felt in a dream, and she knows without a doubt that Revan was afraid.

What does it say, that Revan in the memory was afraid and Bastila in the dream of the memory is not?

“Of course you aren't,” Malak says. She can read the ghost of a smile in the way his eyes crinkle, tenderness in the graze of his knuckles against her jawline. With most expression stolen from him with his jaw, it is her knowledge of him – Revan's knowledge of him – that lets her read him.

Malak places his hand across her throat, tender as though he is cradling something fragile and easily destroyed in the palm of his hand – a flower, an ice crystal. Then he presses down.

Bastila chokes and gags and becomes aware only as she struggles that her hands are tied over her head to – to something, the headboard she supposes, trying frantically to distance herself from this scenario of abuse. Something hard and thin and flexible bites into her wrists – cord, probably plastic, an easy material to attain shipboard.

One of her legs is splayed wide on the bed, hanging off so comfortably that they have to be in military quarters, somewhere with a bed that narrow. (Though Revan is taller than Bastila; perhaps it's only that.) The other stretches out downward. Malak sits on the edge of the bed between them, leaning over her with a bulk that should make her claustrophobic and yet doesn't. His free hand grips her dangling foot, sketches feather-light circles over the sole.

She doesn't understand a  _shred_ of what is going on, except that she wants it to stop.

Except that she – or Revan, in the dream, she  _must_ attribute this to Revan – does not in fact want it to stop.

There is heat pulsing between her legs, drawn up through capillary action in her breast bone and spine to heat her thoroughly in a way she tells herself is unfamiliar. Her trembling is not entirely from exertion and lack of breath. When Malak at last relents – a weirdly gentle gesture, again, his hand retreating only to cup her cheek – air rushes gloriously into her straining lungs. There is exultation in the relief and tucked deep in the hollow space in her breast something like disappointment.

“Told you I wasn't,” Revan says with their lips and laughs, a sound intermixed with coughing.

“You never are,” Malak says – if Bastila is not imagining it, and Revan agrees, there is sarcasm hiding behind the computer-flat vowels. He leans over her, and it feels like insanity but is the rightest thing in the world to strain up, fighting to kiss his shoulder.

His hands meet hers, tied as they are, and grip firmly. His hands do not feel so large – no, it's only that Revan's fingers are longer than Bastila expects them to be; sudden disorientation that has nothing to do with oxygen starvation grips her.

“Breathe, Revan,” Malak says, which is when Bastila becomes aware that she is coughing again. The pain, totally out of her perception one minute, is the next overwhelming, and that little absurdity _has_ to be the dream. She hiccoughs and fights to sync their breaths – at least it's easy to track Malak's, amplified as they are. Air hisses painfully through a bruised throat.

They get control at last.

“Does it hurt?” Malak asks, hands still in hers, thumb caressing Revan's right knuckles.

The insane impulse to lie flutters through Bastila's mind, but Revan says, “Some,” and “We don't need to stop.”

“Your throat is bruising spectacularly already.”

“'S what the mask's for.”

“It is not--” Malak begins, then seems to realize Revan's teasing him (When had Bastila understood that?) and sighs, sound smoothed out by the computer. “I suppose it's the only way I have of shutting you up.”

If Revan is disappointed that Malak stopped strangling her, it doesn't last much longer. Bastila counts two more strained breaths, feels herself convulse on the bed with another coughing fit as though in more pain than she feels in the dream – or, a foreign and far more experienced voice whispers, as though in orgasm – and then Malak's wide hand trails down her wrist, over the soft skin of her underarm and up her neck to cover her mouth and nose.

She closes her eyes, and the movement feels oddly natural for what is just another part of the memory, for this one actually is one Bastila _wants_. The room goes dark. Her sensations narrow to the sharp sensation of cord against her wrists and the softer, deadly pressure of Malak's hand.

As the moment stretches on, growing more dangerous with each passing second, she is aware of more; the thin military-issue mattress under her and the way the bare skin over her shoulders chafes against it, the feeling of the balls of one foot pressed against the wall. Malak's knee, resting on the bed against her naked hip. Finally – Revan reaching to distract herself, presumably, from the growing pain – the Force comes flooding in, Malak like a glowing hearth she warms herself at continuously; beyond him, the lives around them on the ship are constellations of faraway stars. The layout of the room is a dim outline in faded chalk beneath all of that power: the footlocker at the end of the bed, perhaps two paces to the fresher door, trunks set into the far wall. The other door at the far end of the room, and she does not know what is beyond that because before Revan could reach for it Malak's hand retreats again and she can breathe.

She has never appreciated oxygen enough in her waking life. When she gets up today she will remedy that.

Revan is back in her body, or Bastila is – she can never figure out, in these dreams, how much control she has over her perceptions in Revan's mind. She is aware as she was not before of smaller sensations, pleasure and discomfort both. The straps of her bra dig into her shoulders, the sweaty, unraveling mess that is her braid piled under her head digs at her with the sensation of tears leaking out from under her eyelids. Yet her toes flex in time with the pulsing heat that spreads from her pelvis and breast to the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet, and there is Malak, stroking a strand of hair out of her face.

“Shh,” Malak says again, and Force, Bastila wishes he would go back to choking them. “Shh, Revan. Force, _Revan,_ ” and their name on his lips is like a prayer, and Revan's lips curve again, wildly, upward. 

Bastila begins, unwillingly, to understand.

“You're too calm,” Revan says and kisses him, over the seam between metal and flesh. Bastila tastes metal and salt and pretends that her breaths, almost even now, do not speed up again with it.

“Calm, am I?” Malak's hands close over their shoulders with a strength that could crack bone – if only he allowed it to.

“Yes. Fix that, damn you,” Revan says, and laughs, and coughs again.

Bastila wakes on the  _Hawk,_ legs tangled in the sheets. Trapped between sleep and consciousness, she lingers in fading impressions of the dream – of hard muscle against her skin, ridged scars brushing her stomach; Malak inside her as she strains against him, fighting not for escape but to meet him faster.

When Bastila walks into the main hold and sees Sameela, she involuntarily pictures her in bed. Her face flushed and lips curved in the daredevil grin of her swoop races, and piled on the pillow all of that long, blue black hair.

“Hey, Bastila?” Carth says. “You don't look so good. Rough night?”

“Me too,” Sameela mutters, rubbing her forehead. A strand of hair flutters at the movement, having escaped her braid. Bastila imagines brushing it back herself, mirroring Malak in the dream.

“I'm fine,” Bastila snaps, and tries not to look as though she is fleeing when she turns on her heel to go to the fresher. She can shower _before_ breakfast.

The flush from her cheeks to her feet might be only an effect of the hot water – if this was Dantooine and the shower wasn't sonic only. Ruthlessly, she suppresses her awareness of it. She will meditate after breakfast.

She tries not to wonder what Sameela thinks of the dream; whether she thinks herself unhinged, dreaming such things about Malak – or if she is suspicious.

 

Malak's teeth close over the tip of the finger of the glove, trapping it, impressively, without so much as pinching her skin. He tilts his head back, closing his lips over the finger of the glove to assist his teeth, and it slides off.

Bastila, in Revan's body, stares down at him. Her view of the room is filtered, the balance of light just a hair off what she would expect, and she realizes belatedly that they are wearing the mask. (The shiver that goes through her at that thought is definitely Revan.)

Malak brings his hands up only then, takes the glove from his own lips, then licks them. They're chapped, a healing fissure in one side. The cracked skin glistens with saliva.

They are extending their other hand in a wordless order when Bastila distinctly _hears_ Revan think, _Force, the things that boy could do with his jaw when he still had it--_

The words are not safely past, a part of a memory long since concluded. They're here. With her.

 _REVAN!_ she shrieks, mortification absolute.

There is a presence that has become so near to her soul, so much a constant part of her life, that she scarcely notices it anymore – any more than she notices her heart taking up space in her chest. Right now, it shrivels in what she supposes is the closest Revan comes to feeling shame, so apparently she was not the only one who thought herself alone.

That might be some comfort in about a month when she's less embarrassed.

_Bastila,_ Revan says.  _Shit, you would be here, wouldn't you. Sorry, I didn't realize_ .

It would be more helpful without the rasping note in her voice that tells Bastila – in the way it could only tell a lover, or someone who has been watching her have sex in her sleep for the past six months – that she is still very much in the mood of a woman anticipating pleasure.

Oblivious to them both, the Revan in the memory brushes her knuckles over Malak's brow before settling her hand on his scalp. There is a faint prickling against her palm, and Bastila now knows – against her will – that Malak shaves his head deliberately.

_Could we possibly have this conversation somewhere_ else _?_ Bastila says. There is a hideously shrill note in her voice, betraying desperation to the least trustworthy of parties.

_Give me a sec, I'll work on it_ .

There is a fleeting impression that the other presence in her skull has sat back on its heels, considering, and so Bastila is fairly sure Revan means it.

This is scant consolation in the face of Malak in the dream, moving forward to nestle his face against the hollow of Revan's hip. A seam in Revan's armor presses between his cheek and their leg, and there is a buckle on the utility belt that has to be killing him, but he sighs as contently as though it was her bare skin.

Fondness rises in Revan like high tide, swallowing anger and exhaustion effortlessly. She loves Malak enough to let go of it.

Oh, Force, Bastila shouldn't be  _seeing_ this. Doesn't want to see it.

_It's not really something I wanted to share, trust me,_ Revan says, and  _I think I've got it_ .

Just as Malak is rising and settling his fingers on the first of the clasps that hold up Revan's cape, something flickers in the dream--

Bastila turns, blinks her eyes open in the hold, and promptly falls out of the bunk.

“Fuck!” she hisses, and other, more explicit words.

“Easy,” Revan's voice says above her, floating out of the darkness. Bastila scrambles to her feet with a panic that rises up from hidden places in her, places untouched by Jedi and Sith and her knowledge of what Revan has done; it is an evolutionary fear that tells her only that there is a predator above her, and she is trapped.

Bastila is shivering when she gets to the light switch.

But Mission and Juhani are sleeping, so instead of turning it on she grabs her cloak from the end of the bed and starts out into the hallway.

To her surprise, Revan follows her. It's a little unnerving, but even the flickering, pale light of the night cycle shows Bastila that Revan is – deceptively – human, which is enough to still the panic.

In fact, when they settle in the couches in the hold and Bastila gets a chance to look at her, Revan largely appears to be tired. Her gold toned skin is a little darker than Bastila's, but still light enough to show dark smudges under her eyes, and her hair is still loose for sleep.

Messy, hip length hair, loose, soft fabric for sleep pants and a totally unarmored tank top; she appears almost harmless. A civilian woman in her underwear. Her eyes are safely, darkly brown.

An illusion of the most lethal degree, Bastila thinks, and tries not to notice that the thin fabric of Revan's tank top leaves her stiffening nipples completely visible. The life support systems cool down the ship by a few degrees on the night cycle to facilitate sleep. That's all it is.

“Bastila,” Revan says, and stops, and starts again. “Are you okay?'

“Why wouldn't I be okay?” Bastila pulls her cloak around herself like a shield. It's only that, as she has been thinking, the hold is too cold for them both.

“Why not, indeed,” Revan mutters, and scrubs a hand back over her forehead, pushing her hair into further disarray. “Why the hell not. I'm going to make some caf, you want any?” She rises mid-question.

“With sugar, please,” Bastila says, and huddles in her cloak.

She's tired – a glance at the clock tells her that she was only asleep for perhaps two or three hours before Revan pulled them both from the dream. Her eyes drift shut as she listens to the small sounds of Revan making caf. For all the source's questionable status, they're reassuring – cooking sounds,  _living_ sounds, small clinking noises as dishes impact the counter of the pull-out kitchenette, grinding of beans, brushing of fabric as Revan moves.

“About that,” Revan says a few minutes later, sitting down with the caf. “Ah.”

“Yes?” Bastila says, cupping her hands around her chipped mug. The heat sinks into the palms of her hands and from there permeates her, comforting as sunlight, grounding her solidly in the night time ship.

“Do you have,” Revan says, and breaks off. She dips her face, breathing in the steam from the caf. Her hair falls around her, hiding her like a cloak. “Questions, about what you saw?”

“I see no need to discuss it,” Bastila says truthfully.

Nevertheless, just those words bring back a flash of memory – Malak's surprisingly full lips, his tongue darting out to trace them, his pupils dilated. Bastila manages to keep the hitch in her breath out of her voice, somehow. “It is, as you pointed out, a private matter.” The next part comes more easily, thank the Force: “I apologize for the intrusion. It was not intentional.”

“Yeah, well.” Revan is easily mollified tonight. She tucks one heel under her, takes a hand off the mug and pulls her hair back from her face. “If you were prying, that's not what you'd go looking for.”

“I don't exactly intend to write a mission report to the Council on the subject, no,” Bastila says dryly, and Revan laughs, and she knows her deception was successful.

What deception? She truly wouldn't go prying for that particular set of memories – would she?

And to what end?

 

To what end, any of it?

Buffeted by a thousand responsibilities in the daytime, Bastila still can never quite distract herself from the one true mission. The mission which she was horrified and honored to be entrusted with. The mission she lives and breathes for; the mission the Council believes will end the war.

The mission she has already failed.

Revan knows who she is.

So little changed when Bastila found out that she manages to forget for whole days. Revan becomes just another name, unremarkable when thought so many times a day. Revan herself is no more morbid than HK or Canderous – truthfully substantially less disturbing company than either – and nearly a year after her deposition as Sith Lord, her aura is tainted no darker than Juhani's. She walks like a human and talks like a soldier and acts like a Jedi.

So Bastila puts out of her mind the inevitable crash and burn. She does not consider that Revan was deemed safe to expose to the Star Forge only given her total ignorance and unfailing loyalty to the Light, and Revan does not merely have hints; Revan  _knows who she is_ .

If Bastila had a tenth of the courage and fidelity she is credited with she would have warned the council, grounded the ship on Manaan and called the whole thing off – and let Revan kill her for it.

She tells herself there hasn't been a good opportunity. There were too many Sith on Manaan and Czerka on Kashyyyk and Tatooine, too many independent ships and false ID distributors on all of the above; too many opportunities for Revan to break for it for that sacrifice to be worth it. She tells herself that plotting too far ahead working against a more powerful Force sensitive is a bad idea. The Force will warn Revan as surely as it would Bastila if she had a definite plan or if she makes the decision too far ahead of time.

But Bastila knows these are excuses. The truth is that she hasn't called off the mission because she's afraid.

Not that it would be so bad to lose her life, truly. She risks it in every battle and it has never made her hesitate. The real truth, now: Bastila has not warned the Council because she cares for Revan. She is afraid _for_ Revan, not of her.

She twists in the bunk, turns onto her side and pulls the limp pillow to her chest. Across the room, Revan is apparently already asleep on her stomach, face pillowed in her arms and hidden by all of that hair.

Unwillingly, Bastila imagines running her fingers through it, pressing her cheek to it. It's soft – she knows because Revan needed help brushing and braiding it when she broke her wrist fighting the terentatek on Kashyyk. It's much longer than Bastila's own.

She drifts to sleep between one of those thoughts and the next, unaware of the transition.

There is a knife in her hand.

Bastila quails at it, but shuts down the emotion instinctively, afraid for some reason she can't articulate of discovery. As she orients herself, she realize she is, afraid Revan will evict her from the dream if she comes aware.

Afraid? Isn't that what she  _wants_ ? Not to see this?

But the presence inside her breast is utterly still. Bastila recognizes the feel in Revan's mind of one who is not having a lucid dream. Most likely she will not realize Bastila is there.

Most likely, Bastila – who hasn't learned to end the visions – couldn't escape if she wanted to.

“Revan,” Malak says, and she understands that the smooth, soft surface she is balancing the knife on is his back. “Revan, I thought--”

“I believe I told you to stop talking,” Revan says.

There is a note in her tone that Bastila imagined there, often, before they met. It is a note she has never actually heard.

“ _Revan,_ ” Malak says, halfway to a whine.

“Shut up,” Revan says, and her voice is pure cruelty.

The knife bites in, parting his skin. Malak shudders under them, shoulders tensing. Bastila watches through Revan's eyes as his head ducks down, lower, and a soft sound comes from his throat.

“That's better,” Revan says. She turns the blade to stroke the flat of it over the vertebrae, staining Malak's pale skin – paler than Bastila's own, far lighter than Revan's – a violent red.

Bastila's breath (No, Revan's, everything about this is Revan!) shudders on the way in. Their heart is in their throat.

“Yes, my lord,” Malak says underneath them. His chest heaves against their thighs. He is breathing hard.

Revan shifts her weight, moving forward and upward to put more of it on her knees. Bastila can't quite hear her thoughts in the memory, but she gets the general intentions. Revan is concerned Malak is having trouble breathing, with her straddling his back like this.

She's concerned. About Malak. While she cuts him open with a knife.

Force, Bastila wants to wake up now.

But instead they lean forward, bracing one elbow on the wall – Bastila is aware, when she had not previously been, of the wall the bed is up against – to hold their balance.

Revan presses her lips to the cut, and just as Bastila is telling herself she can't possibly, she licks it.

The taste of blood is something Bastila is intimately familiar with. She has had her nose broken in training duels or been punched in the mouth at least fifty times. She has never thought to encounter it like _this_ – or to experience the electric tingle that travels down their spine at the taste, the way their own breath speeds up.

Revan, apparently, likes blood. Consequently, for the duration of the dream, so will Bastila.

Revan tongues the cut, and Malak shudders under them. Bastila feels Revan flick her awareness out, checking Malak's emotions in the same distant way Bastila might check the fuel gauge on a speeder, deciding whether they have room to continue or should turn back.

Revan sighs internally, deciding they had better slow down, turn back. Bastila's relief must be nearly equal to Malak's, at least.

She kisses the top of the cut again, and there is an odd tingle in the skin of her lips. It is something familiar to Bastila yet so unexpected in this context that she nearly does not understand. A spark in the Force jumps from them to Malak.

Energy travels from the kiss down the wound, and top to bottom, the cut closes; heals; is gone, with only that red stain confirming its prior existence.

“Oh,” Malak says, very softly in the darkness. He sighs, and at the end of it: “Thank you, my lord.”

“Always,” Revan says, voice low, and another word after it in a language Bastila doesn't speak, so she understands only the meaning: _sweetheart_.

Malak laughs softly, under them. They straighten enough to see his face, turned to the side, and they see him smiling.

Revan shifts, pulls her leg out from over him, but when Malak starts to turn she stills him with a touch. “The blood.”

“Ah.” Malak is instantly contrite. “Wouldn't want to have to explain things to the cleaning staff?”

“The rumors are bad enough as it is,” Revan says, and calls a towel to her hand from the open fresher door. “Just a sec, sweetheart. Be patient."

With those words, Bastila is aware of something she has been trying to ignore: the scene is not over. There is an all-pervading tension filling the room, and in each breath the taste of eagerness is drawn in.

Revan wipes the blood off Malak with a care that is disturbing in the intensity of its focus – or perhaps in the way the focus is on skin and muscles, not the person underneath her. Bastila is reminded of the feel of cleaning her lightsaber.

Then Malak is rolling over onto his back, Revan falling over him again. One hand settles on the nape of his neck, the other on his hip.

Bastila is viscerally present in the moment when Revan takes Malak inside her.

The stretch is terribly dissonant because she is expecting it to be something like her own – experimentations, so to say, with objects made for that purpose. But Revan is no near-virgin, and the motions are practiced and eagerly awaited. She thrusts onto Malak and is filled by him in turn.

The room drops out of focus when she closes her eyes. Bastila feels their fingers fluttering against his hip, their shoulders tensing, raising and locking with the touch.

Practiced or not, the thrusting is overwhelming. Bastila tries to bite her lip, but can't. Revan shows tension in other ways; she arches her spine, drops her head back.

Their hips raise and fall, their breaths come shuddering, faster and faster; their hand locks onto Malak's hip with a force that will bring bruises.

Bastila is only vaguely aware of Revan's awareness that Malak's movements are becoming erratic, his thrusts to meet them shallower, unsteady. But she is jolted back into the scene when Revan abruptly drops down, onto Malak's chest. She grips Malak's hip for balance with one hand and brings the other around to the hollow of his throat, which she strokes with a deceptively gentle thumb.

“ _Don't_ ,” she says.

Fear floods Malak's aura with a metallic tang like blood. Like blood, Revan shudders at it in what could be delight.

“Yes, my lord,” Malak says, but his tone is mutinous.

“We could bring the knife back,” Revan says.

“Please. My lord.”

“I didn't think so,” Revan says, and settles back onto her heels, tensing around Malak and making both of them groan. “Be patient.”

Bastila is fairly certain she knows what that's about, but she isn't _sure_ until a few beats later. Revan comes, hand convulsing on Malak's throat but never _quite_ pressing down enough to choke him; only after she says, “You may. Quietly.”

Malak doesn't make a sound in orgasm.

Waking, Bastila is first aware that her hand has drifted between her legs in her sleep. Thankfully – mercifully – it is also trapped under her stomach and invisible to the others.

She hears movement in the dorm. Revan, the Force bond tells her, is the one hastily dressing, the one who slams the door and makes Mission swear at her.

The one who enters the shower, breath quick with arousal, relieved to find privacy as she lifts off her sleep shirt...

Bastila withdraws her hand and attempts, discretely, to wipe it on the sheets. _Then_ she sits up and fishes frantically for her datapad.

Two more weeks to Korriban. Force damn it, she is actually looking _forward_ to it; sleeping in proximity with Revan makes this worse. Perhaps they can skip straight to the inevitable betrayal after, and save themselves some embarrassment.

Later, awake and dressed: it finally occurs to her that the memory – despite blood, sex and 'my lord' – must have been of a time before Revan's fall was complete. In it, after all, she healed.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Liked the fic? Consider reblogging [on tumblr](https://slashmarks.tumblr.com/post/167036285285/analyzing-my-behavior).


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